


Of Sweets and Nightlights

by alianora



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 15:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5831122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianora/pseuds/alianora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is their life now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Sweets and Nightlights

**Author's Note:**

> Written December 12, 2006

It should have been easy. A wicked Queen was dead, defeated, and Aslan himself had put them on the throne in her place.

It should have been easy. Peter was wise, and Susan pretty, Edmund brave, while Lucy laughed and made friends with all of the creatures they found themselves ruling.

But, after the first week, when Peter found Lucy crying in the gardens, things changed.

“I miss our mother,” she had told him, face pressed into his shoulder. Little hands clutched at his tunic. “And…and I miss sweets.”

He held her and soothed her, and looked helplessly at Susan over Lucy’s head. She stared back at him, and for the first time, he saw the lines of stress around her mouth.

She knelt, in a flurry of skirts, skirts nothing like what she used to wear to school before, and bowed her head beside Lucy’s. “I miss her too,” she whispered, looking up at Peter.

When he woke the next morning, with a servant’s whiskery face bent close to his, lisping through too large teeth, “Time to awaken, Your Majesty,” Peter remembered how his mother would smile in the dim light of the lamp beside his bed.

Edmund seemed to be adjusting the best, but he had been so quiet lately that Peter barely saw him anymore, except at audiences. But Edmund was silent, looking out over the petitioners, eyes going often to the mountains and the small path between them.

Peter worried, and Susan grew pale. 

She spent most nights in Lucy’s room, singing her to sleep, and then watching over her. “She’s fine, most days,” she told him. “But at night, she misses things, and she doesn’t have a nightlight.” She was silent for a moment, looking up at him. “You’ve gotten taller,” she said in faint surprise. “How odd.”

“I keep waiting to wake up,” he confessed, settling his broader shoulders into the tunic that the Badgers had given to him the day before.

“We won’t wake up,” Susan said, smoothing white hands down her full skirt. “This is our life now.”

“Without nightlights?”

She almost smiled. “Without nightlights, or school, or sweets.” She leaned into him, and he noticed that she only came up to his chest now. “Without mother.”

He pulled her closer, his beautiful, sad, sister. “With each other.”

 

END


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